How Shipway Is Using AI To Drive Post-Purchase Efficiency For India’s D2C Brands

India’s D2C economy is projected to surpass $310 Bn by 2030, and the brands driving this growth have largely mastered the front end of ecommerce, building products, acquiring customers and driving online conversions. However, managing what happens after checkout remains a far more complex task.  

As ecommerce penetrates deeper into Tier II & III markets, fulfilment is becoming increasingly complex. D2C brands in India typically report return-to-origin (RTO) rates of 20-30%, while categories such as fashion, footwear and lifestyle often see even higher rates due to their reliance on cash-on-delivery orders. 

For context, an RTO occurs when a delivery fails, and the package is returned to the seller, creating additional costs. Failed deliveries, fragmented courier networks and rising customer support costs can quietly eat into margins, turning fulfilment from a logistics challenge into a data and intelligence problem. This is the opportunity Shipway by Unicommerce is looking to address. 

Shipway operates an AI-powered ecommerce logistics and post-purchase automation platform that helps brands manage fulfilment after checkout. Today, it serves thousands of brands and processes millions of shipment events annually across India, providing visibility into delivery patterns across customers, courier partners and geographies. 

“Historically, brands focused heavily on customer acquisition and conversion. Today, profitability increasingly depends on what happens after checkout,” said Kapil Makhija, CEO, Unicommerce.

The company sees fulfilment as one of the most important levers for improving ecommerce profitability and customer retention. With customer expectations around delivery transparency and service quality continuing to rise, Shipway believes brands will increasingly need automation and intelligence to manage post-purchase operations at scale. 

Central to this vision is ShipSense, Shipway’s AI-powered fulfilment intelligence engine, which the company believes will shape the next evolution of ecommerce logistics. Here’s a deep dive into the platform and the problem it aims to solve. 

How ShipSense Uses AI To Optimise Courier Allocation 

Shipway by Unicommerce manages the post-purchase journey for ecommerce brands, bringing courier allocation, shipment tracking, COD verification, returns management, and customer communication onto a single platform. At the heart of this offering is ShipSense, the company’s AI-powered fulfilment intelligence engine that powers courier allocation. 

A courier partner that achieves a 95% delivery success rate in Bengaluru one week, for instance, may see its performance deteriorate the next week due to factors such as weather disruptions, festive-season demand spikes, or local network constraints. Unlike traditional logistics systems that rely on fixed rules to assign courier partners, ShipSense continuously evaluates changing delivery conditions. 

To address this, ShipSense goes beyond predefined rules and analyses three layers of data before assigning a courier to a shipment. 

The first layer is order intelligence, which analyses factors such as the shipment’s origin and destination, order value, and expected delivery timeline. The second is the customer intelligence layer, which evaluates whether the customer has previously received orders, their purchase frequency, and any history of refusing cash-on-delivery (COD) shipments or returning products. 

The third layer, carrier intelligence, assesses which courier is performing best in a particular geography at that moment. Rather than relying on historical performance from months ago, it tracks real-time service-level agreement (SLA) adherence, serviceability coverage, transit timelines, and live RTO trends across courier partners. 

Together, the three intelligence layers help identify the courier partner that is both the most cost-effective and most likely to successfully complete a specific delivery for a particular customer. 

This solves much of the RTO problem. For every RTO, businesses not only bear the cost of the failed delivery attempt and return shipment but also face inventory lock-ups while products remain in transit. 

For high-volume D2C brands, RTOs can quietly erode margins. Common causes include incorrect addresses, unverified COD orders, customer unavailability, delivery refusals, and low-purchase intent. 

ShipSense reduces this risk by identifying customers and geographies at higher risk of RTOs before an order is dispatched. It verifies COD orders via WhatsApp or IVR calls before dispatch, and when deliveries still fail, it triggers an automated non-delivery report (NDR) management workflow to follow up with customers, reschedule deliveries, and improve recovery rates, rather than automatically returning orders. 

“This reduces operational overhead, shortens resolution timelines, improves customer satisfaction, and increases the likelihood of retaining customers for future purchases,” said Makhija.

To put this into perspective, D2C brand Dr. Veda, a Shipway customer, increased its delivery success rate from 79% to 85%, a 6-percentage-point improvement, according to Makhija.

In another example shared by the company, the innerwear brand Bummer reported a 67% reduction in RTOs with ShipSense, while the children’s footwear brand ONYC increased its delivery success rate to 94% and reduced shipping costs by 31%. 

According to the data shared by the company, merchants using the Shipway platform have reported up to a 50% reduction in RTOs and up to a 60% decline in WISMO (Where Is My Order?) queries. 

The data suggests that Shipway’s strongest product-market fit lies with D2C brands that have outgrown manual logistics management but lack the resources to build in-house fulfilment intelligence systems. Fashion, beauty, wellness, and lifestyle brands tend to adopt it most, largely because these categories handle high cash-on-delivery volumes and complex returns. 

Why Shipway Is Betting On Fulfilment Intelligence

The effectiveness of any AI system depends on the quality and scale of data powering it. For Shipway, that advantage stems from the volume of fulfilment activity flowing through its platform every day.

Today, it processes millions of shipment events annually across India and has also reached an annual recurring revenue (ARR) run rate of around ₹85 Cr, according to its Q4 FY26 reported figures. Shipway’s every shipment generates valuable data points, including delivery outcomes, courier performance, customer behaviour and geography-specific trends. 

Over time, this has enabled Shipway to build a large and continuously evolving intelligence layer and develop a powerful data flywheel. As more brands use the platform and more shipments flow through its platform, Shipway gains deeper visibility into the factors that drive successful deliveries and those that lead to failures. 

These insights are then fed back into products such as ShipSense, helping improve courier allocation, RTO prediction, delivery optimisation and customer communication. The more the platform is used, the smarter it becomes.

According to Makhija, Shipway is now looking to extend this intelligence layer beyond traditional ecommerce deliveries. One of its key focus areas is Shipway Cargo, through which it plans to strengthen its presence in B2B and quick-commerce logistics.

At the same time, the company is working to automate more fulfilment workflows and drive wider adoption of ShipSense among ecommerce brands. 

“The long-term vision is to become the operating system for ecommerce fulfilment intelligence, helping brands make smarter decisions across courier allocation, delivery optimisation, RTO prediction, returns management, customer communication, and retention,” said Makhija. 

Makhija also shared that the company focuses on two key priorities: improving the delivery experience for customers and providing responsive support to merchants. He added that merchant feedback plays an important role in product development at Shipway, with several product updates originating from seller inputs.

As ecommerce operations become increasingly complex, Makhija believes the company’s technology capabilities, delivery expertise and merchant support offerings position it to address evolving market needs.

What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that as customer expectations rise and profitability comes under greater scrutiny, post-purchase operations are moving from the periphery to the centre of ecommerce strategy. 

For companies such as Shipway, this shift could unlock one of the largest opportunities in the next phase of digital commerce growth.

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